The revived Alemany Farm, which is tucked behind the Alemany housing project.

The revived Alemany Farm, which is tucked behind the Alemany housing project.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

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Jason Mark (top) is a garden manager of the revived Alemany Farm, which is tucked behind the Alemany housing project (above) and which hosts U-pick harvests for housing residents.

Jason Mark (top) is a garden manager of the revived Alemany Farm, which is tucked behind the Alemany housing project (above) and which hosts U-pick harvests for housing residents.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

Image 4 of 6

Jason Mark (top) is a garden manager of the revived Alemany Farm, which is tucked behind the Alemany housing project (above) and which hosts U-pick harvests for housing residents.

Jason Mark (top) is a garden manager of the revived Alemany Farm, which is tucked behind the Alemany housing project (above) and which hosts U-pick harvests for housing residents.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

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The farm's windmill, above, can be seen by neighbors of the farm, which is also a city park. Right: "Agtivist" Jason Mark and volunteer Melissa Conrad take a little break.

The farm's windmill, above, can be seen by neighbors of the farm, which is also a city park. Right: "Agtivist" Jason Mark and volunteer Melissa Conrad take a little break.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

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The farm's windmill, above, can be seen by neighbors of the farm, which is also a city park. Right: "Agtivist" Jason Mark and volunteer Melissa Conrad take a little break.

The farm's windmill, above, can be seen by neighbors of the farm, which is also a city park. Right: "Agtivist" Jason Mark and volunteer Melissa Conrad take a little break.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

S.F.'s Alemany Farm - new crop of farmers

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Red-winged blackbirds dart between a windmill and a pond ringed with cattails, their song cutting through rush-hour white noise on Interstate 280.

It's easy to whiz by and never see Alemany Farm, the 4-acre organic plot tucked behind a subsidized housing project, where a group of San Francisco urban farmers is growing produce to fight food insecurity.

Alemany Farm, with its sloped rows of chard, kale, broccoli and onions; a greenhouse for seedlings; beehives; and fruit trees, is the counter-argument to the belief that organic food is a preoccupation of the well-to-do. It's an urban garden that is also a city park, open 365 days a year with unlocked gates, where neighbors can wander in and pick an artichoke or strawberries whenever they need.

Owned by the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, with a small sliver under city Housing Authority control, Alemany Farm is maintained by a 15-member group of "friends" who organize the weekly volunteer work parties and oversee the U-pick summer harvests for the residents of Alemany housing project. Volunteers and neighbors can walk away with a box of produce - in all, more than 10,000 pounds of food a year.

"Supposedly, concern about where our food comes from is just the aesthetic obsession of the affluent class who can most easily afford it," said Jason Mark, 38, one of the garden managers. "The Alemany residents who come to the farm are every bit as passionate about feeding their families fresh, whole foods."

For Mark, a self-described "agtivist" and editor of the long-standing Berkeley environmental magazine, Earth Island Journal, Alemany Farm is horticultural therapy - a reason to leave the desk, put his fingers in the dirt and see environmentalism in democratic action.

On Earth Day, neighbors and farmers hosted a barbecue and harvest feast in the garden.

"It's a blessing to have access to all that natural food with no chemicals," said neighbor the Rev. Riley, who visits weekly. "I wish more people took advantage of it."

Alemany Farm was a wasteland until it caught the eye of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners in 1994, and the nonprofit removed the debris and planted fruit trees. But the nonprofit was shuttered in the mid-2000s after The Chronicle revealed it was using taxpayer money to pay its workers to campaign for Gavin Newsom in his first mayoral run. The farm reverted to a dumping ground.

Neighbors organized to secure city grants to revive the farm, and when those funds expired, volunteers stepped in. Mark joined in 2005. Today, the farm operates with a $7,500 budget built on small donations and in-kind labor and is becoming a front-runner in the nation's urban farm movement. More than 50 groups visit Alemany Farm each year, from Google employees to second-graders who can already define the word permaculture.

Students from California College of the Arts recently built a storage shed and won a design competition to build an outdoor kitchen for Alemany Farm. Farm managers are talking about reviving an after-school program. The greenhouse is new, and as the farm-to-table movement takes hold, more volunteers are trickling in to help.

"I live in an apartment, and there's no space for this," said volunteer Byron Auker, as he sifted compost into a wheelbarrow with another farm manager, Nick Hoff. "This farm is totally under the radar - it's not in a cool, hip area, so it's underused."

San Francisco's urban farm acreage is limited, but its unique ties to its neighbors positions it as one of the most progressive urban farms, alongside those found in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Ohio and Seattle. Abandoned lots in economically depressed states are converting into farms, and places where the tech boom is strong are creating a push for more contact with the land, Mark said.

"We get a lot of Mission District hipsters who just want to see and taste the fruits of their labors," Mark said, "instead of long days of sending intangible strings of ones and zeros zipping through space."

In April, based on the worries of small-scale city farmers tilling rented land in San Francisco, Mark wrote a story about a new law making its way through the California Legislature to spur urban farming. It would give tax breaks to property owners who commit to leasing their land to small-scale agriculture for at least 10 years. If the law passes, San Francisco growers are eyeing a two-block parcel in the Portola neighborhood with 17 abandoned greenhouses.

For Mark, Alemany Farm is the perfect home for his interest in activism, journalism and organic farming. It took him a while to find it. After graduating from Georgetown University, he wrote for the Bay Guardian and the Martinez News Gazette before shifting into activism. He took a job at Global Exchange and got involved in the antiwar and climate change movements.

It wasn't until he decided to move onto a 14-acre farm at UC Santa Cruz's Farm & Garden extension program that he realized he was most passionate about marrying the sustainable food trend with issues of race and class solidarity.

"If the Journal is my small way of sounding the alarm about environmental threats, the farm is my small way of demonstrating a positive alternative, an effort to show how we can slow down, have more time, if less stuff and money, and explore a way of being more in tune with natural systems. It's a way of living my political beliefs."